Seven years writing the story of Scout Finch

Happy gotcha day to the dog I got in my 20s—the one who's moved into four apartments, one house, and now a converted van by my side.

Seven years ago today my life changed. I know, I know—I’m prone to hyperbole—but I actually don’t think it’s possible to overstate how much adopting Scout has given and taken and challenged and transformed me. The list of things I’d have never done without her is nearly as long as the list of things I love about her: miles long, oceans long, don’t-ever-try-to-complete-this-distance on foot long.

Around 9 am on January 13th, 2019, I walked into the Humane Society of Marathon County to complete adoption paperwork for a “shy but sweet” blue heeler named Zip. With me I carried a yellow floral-patterned collar and a basic black nylon leash and a custom-made metal tag with my phone number inscribed. I signed and initialed and promised to do right by this creature; I paid a modest adoption fee to support the shelter’s operations; I attempted to get my new dog to pose for our first family photo.

January 13th, 2019: Our first photo at the shelter and our first selfie in the car.

Then I led Zip—now Scout Finch from To Kill A Mockingbird—outside, convinced her to jump into my car, and put on the “calming classical” playlist I’d planned a week earlier. (“Studies show that shelter dogs benefit from slow-paced music in the background,” I explained to my boyfriend of five months, “particularly jazz and classical.”)

And then, I sometimes think, I finally started growing up.

That first afternoon I brought Scout to a third-story apartment in downtown Madison, Wisconsin. We shared the space with one of my old college roommates, and it was thanks to him that the living room was adorned with a dramatic poster of Nicolas Cage (a sight that made it into the background of hundreds of our early-days training videos). Here, in this little home, I started trying to Do Everything Right as a dog owner: I hand-fed Scout her meals through engagement exercises and began teaching door manners and started conditioning her to be comfortable wearing a muzzle, just in case. Despite my best efforts at (read: my desperate insistence on) perfection, my new companion developed severe fear-based reactivity anyway. Another dog attacked her on a walk just a couple weeks in, pinning her to the sidewalk while she screamed, and our lives changed all over again.

Scenes from our first few months together. We did so much confidence building on that piano bench!

That summer we moved across town to the first apartment I’d ever lived in on my own (except I wasn’t alone, of course, because I had her now). It was here that we started to make some real training progress in a quieter neighborhood. It was here that we started to catch glimpses of what a life could look like with more joy than worry. Every day at lunch I came home from my marketing job to take Scout out and practice her skills: down stays, loose-leash walking, lots of impulse control.

Our second apartment together had a balcony where we watched the world go by (and I proudly displayed my attempt at a Scout pumpkin carving).

Come spring the world found itself in a global pandemic and Sean—now my boyfriend of almost two years—found himself with a job offer he couldn’t refuse. Scout and I followed him across the country in a rented SUV packed with all our worldly belongings, complete with a portable toilet so I wouldn’t have to go inside a single gas station on the drive down. At the time, it was the scariest and most thrilling adventure of my life. I watched Scout sleep in a sunbeam on the passenger seat for thousands of miles, from Wisconsin to Florida, until we settled on the Space Coast.

Photos taken two days apart: When we left Wisconsin for Florida, and less than an hour after we arrived to our new apartment.

Here we got to live with Sean for the very first time. What a treat! I imagine both my dog and I thought when we fell asleep that night, all three of us together on the full-sized bed. The warmer weather offered easier training opportunities—and the support from a “bonus human” enabled Scout to experience her most consistent dog reactivity wins. Sean and I pioneered Wacky Training Wednesday in this apartment. We fell in love with sunrise beach trips. When it seemed safe, Scout and I attended morning workout classes at a nearby outdoor mall to practice her ability to settle in public. Soon she was confident enough to play outside, too, to truly let loose. I felt our world expanding.

The night Sean proposed to me—a question I knew he was going to ask but was still delighted to answer, heart pounding and hands shaking like all the clichés—we came home and held Scout and felt more like a family than ever. The next morning we played three-creature tug on our favorite stretch of beach and laughed about how, when I first adopted our cattle dog, Sean wasn’t sure he could ever be a dog person. (“But it didn’t take me long to become a Scout person,” he said.)

I think I’ll always remember many of these moments as our glory days. And we didn’t even know it.

A year after we arrived in Florida, we had the opportunity to buy a house and give Scout a yard of her own. It was here, in this home, that we built a makeshift wall climb for her to scale. We set up food searches in the living room and designed obstacle courses outside and filled the freezer with frozen enrichment toys. When we got married, our blue heeler joined the celebration, staying in a rental house with 30 of our loved ones and jumping on the floor for our first dance.

We fostered five dogs in that house of ours, and hosted dozens of bonfires, and earned Scout’s Canine Good Citizen and Advanced Trick Dog titles. We read books on the back porch with our feet in a yellow kiddie pool and our dog baking in the sun between rounds of fetch and tug. We treasured that property because of how much work we put into it, because of the joy we filled it with, and because it was Scout’s.

2022 was one of the biggest years of our lives!

But a couple years later we made an even bigger dream come true. On January 26th 2023, almost exactly four years after I first welcomed a timid Australian cattle dog into my who-knows-where-it’s-going life, we backed out of our driveway for the last time—no longer our driveway, really, soon to belong to a mother and two kids we hoped would love it as much as we had—and hit the road in our converted campervan.

Moments from our first weeks living on the road in Hermes.

It’s been three years since then. We’ve been to 49 states and 9 Canadian provinces and 30-some national parks. This is the longest Scout has lived in a single housing unit—and the longest Sean or I have either since we were baby-faced high schoolers beneath our parents’ roofs, ages away from first meeting.

This spring, in our eighth year all together, we’ll tackle a new adventure: acting as campground hosts (and protecting sea turtle nesting areas!) in the Florida keys.

“The dog you get in your 20s,” I’ve heard, “is with you through everything: the job changes and the moves and the heartbreaks.” I can’t help but think that Scout has been with me through even more than most.

And oh, I love you for it, cattle gal. I love you, I love you, I love you.